Measuring Book Representativeness of aNobii Users’ Reading Profile: A Social Network Analytical Approach
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Ou, I-An
Abstract
Not every item that customers browse or buy can represent their desired preferences. An additional problem is that the degree of preference that each item represents can be different. By using the “exemplar view” theory of cognitive psychology, this study proposes using the concept of “representativeness” to determine whether a few books can represent one’s reading preference. This study’s main aim is to measure the degree to which a book in a user’s online bookshelf is able to represent their preferences by collecting data from aNobii online bookshelves. This data can be used to build a user’s reading profile. A reading profile can be used to generate an item-to-item network by calculating the similarity of each book-to-book pair in a user’s bookshelf. By applying social network analytical (SNA) metrics such as “centrality” and “coreness” to the network one can determine a book’s “representativeness.” Results show that the degree of centrality or coreness of books were significantly correlated to the user’s self-assessed “representativeness.” There was also significant correlation between the social network analytical metrics and the user’s self-assessed “genre knowledge” and “involvement” for books on their bookshelf. It means that it is feasible to use social network analytical metrics to determine how representative a book is of a user’s reading preference. The other objective of this study is to explore the moderated effect of a user’s preference diversity. It is assumed that a user’s preference diversity would affect the correlations between the centrality of books and the user’s self-assessed representativeness. Results show that the correlation between social network analytical metrics and a book’s representativeness is weaker in those who have highly diverse preferences than those who have less diverse preferences.
Subjects
recommender system
preference representativeness
online bookshelf
social network analysis
centrality
coreness
Type
thesis
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